If the international conservation community is serious about protecting and conserving the world’s remaining elephants, it needs fundamentally to change its approach. It must abandon the many myths that currently drive elephant conservation, and replace them with a more realistic and knowledge-based approach.

The book begins with a review of what is currently known today about elephants, their taxonomy, distribution, population trends, conservation status, and the current threats to their continued existence in the wild.

It then reviews some of the issues that continue to hinder elephant conservation today, before examining what a new, knowledge-based approach to conservation might look like. The book ends with specific suggestions as to what might be done to protect and conserve elephants if we really want to give the largest surviving land mammal reasonable prospects for survival.

Nothing much will happen, however, without the public and political will to deal with the obvious problems that confront elephant conservation today.

Likewise, it is only through moral judgment and political choice that we will take the steps necessary to safeguard the future, and that includes not only the future of elephants, their populations and culture, but also the future of the environment, the economy, and human society.